Mist clears over WAP.com

THANKS TO our eagled eyed Norwegian readers, the INQ has pieced together the reasons for the WAP.com domain being up for grabs. As one reader put it, "Some Norwegain bloke owes money to the courts."

That person appears to be Ali Elmasoudi, one-time owner of WAP.com, who has been sentenced in a Norwegian court to pay restitution for "other matters".

So the domain is up for sale to recoup some of the money that the former owner is now ordered to pay.

Which is probably why the email address for bids is Domstol.no as domstol is the Norwegian word for court, anyway. See Wap.com up for sale.

According to our research, originally the domain was owned by the Workers Assistance Program in the USA which was a charity for preventing youngsters turning to alcohol and the like.

It was then purchased for a rumoured $100,000 by some Norwegian chaps who planned to turn it into a massive WAP portal in and around 2000.

WAP.com was then a news portal on phones and WAP applications for the the next 18 months. A company called Wapfactory then bought WAP.com circa March 2001 as it realised WAP.com could not generate any satisfactory revenues as a news site or an advertising funded portal.

Wapfactory appears to have consisted of Børge Krogsrud, Ali Elmasoudi, Erik Nielsen and Per-Arne Skogstad.

So that clears it all up, doesn't it? µ